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"And one with no bun. "
.
in the Mayor's path; he regarded the petals
with pleasant surprise, and then strode
across them, chin held high, into the party.
I wandered out into the early-summer
evening, across Michigan Avenue and into
Millennium Park, Daley's signature de-
velopment in the city center-a twenty-
five-acre site for art, music, and recreation
that replaced a wasteland of tangled rail
lines. There was a free concert under way
in the Frank Gehry-designed band shell,
and thousands of people in T -shirts were
stretched out on blankets across a spectac-
war lawn. It was a diverse crowd, and I was
reminded that in the fifties restaurants in
this part of town refused to serve blacks.
The park opened in 2004, four years late
and hundreds of millions of dollars over
the original budget. The city howled
about waste and corruption in public con-
struction; the Tribune wondered if Chi-
cago was now, officially, "the most cor-
rupt city in America." And then people
moved on. In the intervening years, the
park has helped boost tourism to Chicago
by nearly fifty per cent and has become
one of its most important public spaces.
R ichard Michael Daley, the fourth of
seven children, was thirteen when
his father was first elected mayor, in 1955,
after serving as a state senator and rising
through the machine to become chairman
42 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 8, 2010
.
of the Cook County Democratic Central
Committee. The family lived in a red
brick bungalow built by Daley's parents.
There was a large picture of Jesus on the
living-room wall and seven bronzed baby
shoes on the mantle.
The family had deep roots in Bridge-
port, a heavily Irish enclave beside the
Union Stock Yards. The Daleys were de-
scended from potato-famine refugees
who had settled in Bridgeport in the nine-
teenth century, when it was better known
as Hardscrabble. The father entered pol-
itics as a teen-ager, through the Hamburg
Athletic Club, a mixture of fraternity, po-
litical organization, and street gang that
guarded the neighborhood's racial bound-
aries. When the teen-aged Langston
Hughes wandered into a white section of
the South Side, in 1918, on his first Sun-
day in Chicago, he was beaten by an Irish
gang who, as he put it, "didn't allow nig-
gers in that neighborhood."
Daley's mother, known as Sis, ran the
house. His father was imposing but
attentive, and often home for dinner, de-
spite being "the most powerful local pol-
itician America has ever produced," in
the judgment of Adam Cohen and Eliz-
abeth Taylor, the authors of the biogra-
phy"American Pharaoh" (2000). When
John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, in
1961, the Daleys made the very first so-
cial call to the White House. (In contrast
to the prevailing lore, historians have
concluded that the Old Man did not steal
the election for Kennedy. Chicago's vote
was riddled with fraud, but Richard
Nixon wowd have lost Illinois anyway.)
As a teen-ager, Daley watched his fa-
ther confront a city that was ailing like "a
jukebox running down in a deserted bar,"
as Nelson Algren put it. Middle-class
white homeowners were fleeing to the
suburbs, replaced by poor black migrants
streaming up from the South. The elder
Daley decided on radical treatment: to re-
tain corporations and tax dollars, he do-
nated a city block to make way for the
Sears Tower, the world's tallest skyscraper,
and annexed swaths of the suburbs to ex-
pand O'Hare International Airport. The
perils of inaction, in his view, were on dis-
play in Detroit, which by the nineteen-
seventies had lost a third of its Fortune
500 companies, and had become the na-
tion's murder capital.
He was far less equipped to handle the
other great drama of his day: the civil-
rights crusade. He took office the same
year that Rosa Parks refused to move to
the back of a bus, but he never truly com-
prehended the movement that she em-
bodied. He adhered to what Cohen and
Taylor call a "flinty conservatism," which
was shared byworking-class ethnic whites:
"Daley believed that poor people showd
pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as
his Bridgeport neighbors struggled to do."
From cradle to grave, Daley lived within
a few blocks in a single neighborhood,
and, as his adviser Edward Marciniak
later put it, his position was ''If you grew
up in a place, why do you want to come
into mine?" He opposed desegregation in
schools and affirmative action in the po-
lice department, and used urban-renewal
funds to build public housing. Though he
voiced concerns about building high-rises,
he went ahead with the construction of
towers that eventually became "filing cab-
inets" for the poor, as one federal commis-
sion put it.
The younger Daley believes that his
father is "very misunderstood." He said to
me, "Remember, he got elected by black
voters-1955 all the way to 1975." In-
deed, Daley's machine benefitted from
the support of a black "sub machine,"
which received patronage jobs and access
to welfare and public housing-and voted
the straight machine ticket. But beneath